Books of The Times; The Lessons of Loss Learned in Childhood

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Published: March 24, 1992

Alice McDermott's last novel, the critically acclaimed "That Night," used the story of a doomed teen-age romance to create a resonant portrait of suburban life in the early 1960's: a lyrical and haunting portrait that left the reader with an indelible sense of life's precariousness, the ephemerality of youth and passion and hope.

The same sense of lost innocence and betrayed dreams lingers in the wake of her latest book, "At Weddings and Wakes," a beautifully wrought novel that depicts three generations of an Irish Catholic family in New York through the eyes of three young children. Though the child's point of view and the time frame -- the early 60's, again -- are reminiscent of "That Night," the world portrayed in this volume feels light years removed from that earlier novel's leafy suburbs. It is a world where everyone goes to Mass on Sunday, the women wearing fur collars and hats, the men in dark, somber coats; a world where children dream of growing up to become nuns and priests; a world defined by holiday rituals and dozens of tiny domestic routines.

Though there are excursions to Long Island in "At Weddings and Wakes," the novel takes place, for the most part, in Brooklyn, in the narrow, gloomy apartment of the Towne family, where Momma lives with her three unmarried stepdaughters: May, a kind, retiring woman, whose manners and clothes betray her former vocation as a nun; Veronica, a housebound spinster who drinks too much and spends too much time alone in her room, and Agnes, a bustling, efficient career woman, who prides herself on her knowledge of the world. ("She knew good china, fine cheese, the best seats at every Broadway theater. She knew the best stores, the best tailors, the proper way for a man's suit to fit.")

Their other sister, Lucy, is married and lives on Long Island, but she returns to the apartment twice a week, with her children, to visit Momma and complain about her unhappy marriage and her unfulfilled dreams. It is from the point of view of Lucy's three children -- Margaret, Bobby and Maryanne -- that we come to see the family and understand the ghosts that haunt its collective imagination.

Death, grief and disappointment: these are the lessons that Margaret, Bobby and Maryanne learn from the women in their family, the lessons that early on shatter their innocent apprehension of the world at large. Annie, Momma's sister -- and the mother of Lucy and her sisters -- died shortly after giving birth to Veronica. In time, Momma married Annie's husband, Jack, (and gave birth to a son named John), but it wasn't long before Jack, too, died suddenly, leaving Momma with an ineradicable sense of loss and a lasting bitterness toward the world. John and Veronica have turned to alcohol as a solace from their own private failures, while Agnes, Lucy and May have tried to make a separate, if unsatisfying, peace with their circumscribed lives.

Then, suddenly, for a brief moment, May seems granted a chance at a second life: she falls in love with Fred, the local mailman. At first they speak awkwardly to each other about the weather, and their families, but one day, Fred takes May out to dinner. He starts sending her flowers every week -- roses and daisies and violently colored gladioluses -- and finally, after five years, he proposes.

At the wedding reception, the children look at May and Fred and realize that "something indeed had happened in that hour since they'd left the church together."

"A consummation of sorts that had made them clearly husband and wife, made them so firmly husband and wife that it seemed for the moment that they could no longer be aunt, sister, stepdaughter, stranger, mailman, as well. They had shed, in the past hour, or perhaps only in the time since they entered this perfectly lit, hourless, seasonless place, everything about themselves but one another."

The marriage is short-lived. Four days after the wedding, May is dead: a startling, inexplicable death ("Something burst inside her"), as senseless and sudden as that of her mother and father.

This tragic event is mentioned by Ms. McDermott early in this elliptical novel, before we really understand the sad history of the Towne family, and it informs our reading of all that follows. We read about May's girlhood, her entry into and departure from the convent, her courtship and her wedding, all with the awful knowledge of her eventual fate.

For May's young nephew and nieces, her story will mark their initiation into "that current of loss after loss that was adulthood." Like the modern-day Romeo and Juliet story that stands at the center of "That Night," the story of May's wedding and wake will become a kind of touchstone: it will forever divide the lives of Margaret, Bobby and Maryanne into a before and after.

In describing Margaret, Bobby and Maryanne's memories of their youth, Ms. McDermott rarely uses their names; they are usually referred to, simply, as "the children." Their perceptions, too, are invested with a certain timeless quality: a single afternoon at Momma's becomes a metaphor for all the afternoons spent there; a single Christmas becomes all holidays. As rendered through Ms. McDermott's rich, supple prose, and infused with her quiet, emotional wisdom, the story of these three children and their family assumes a kind of mythic resonance: it becomes a parable about all families and all families' encounters with love, mortality and sorrow.